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sweet_asteriaa 's review for:
The Power
by Naomi Alderman
I really need some more time to sit with this.
It takes the current power balance and flips it on its head. Women become the dominant power. The atrocities they deal with today happen to the men. It's unsettling to read, and at the same time, strange to realize I've been pretty desensitized to these things happening to women, that it seems to hit a bit different when it's the men who are abused and diminished. Perhaps the correct words would be, that it's telling. It's very telling. The last chapter has my favorite quote, under a spoiler tag. I laughed a loud, but it isn't very funny.
For one thing, of course, we don’t have original manuscripts dating back more than a thousand years. All the books we have from before the Cataclysm have been re-copied hundreds of times. That’s a lot of occasions for errors to be introduced. And not just errors. All of the copyists would have had their own agendas. For more than two thousand years, the only people re-copying were nuns in convents. I don’t think it’s at all a stretch to suggest that they picked works to copy that supported their viewpoint and just let the rest moulder into flakes of parchment. I mean, why would they re-copy works that said that men used to be stronger and women weaker? That would be heresy, and they’d be damned for it. This is the trouble with history. You can’t see what’s not there.
It takes the current power balance and flips it on its head. Women become the dominant power. The atrocities they deal with today happen to the men. It's unsettling to read, and at the same time, strange to realize I've been pretty desensitized to these things happening to women, that it seems to hit a bit different when it's the men who are abused and diminished. Perhaps the correct words would be, that it's telling. It's very telling. The last chapter has my favorite quote, under a spoiler tag. I laughed a loud, but it isn't very funny.